Paul Curtin - Gray Snow

“He doesn’t know shit. Just keep your mouth shut. Which one’s Sean’s?”

Elise pointed to a plate, and Michael grabbed different ones. “Just keep quiet,” he said and walked toward the living room.

The kids had all gathered around the fire and Travers was showing them a card trick. Aidan smiled and looked shocked as the trick came to its climax.

“Is that your card?” Travers said.

“How did you do that?” Aidan said.

“I got many mysteries, my good boy. Many mysteries.”

Molly looked up as Michael extended a plate to her. “Chicken and potatoes tonight?” she asked.

“Yep.”

Travers leaned over and eyed the plate. “How’d you make them potatoes?”

Michael played it cool. He knows nothing. “With potatoes.”

Travers smiled. “They instant? Can’t still have fresh ones?”

“You’ll have to ask the cook.”

“’Course. She would know best what’s in ’em.”

The stranger looked up at him with the most genuine smile, so expressive even his eyes showed warmth. That was how to tell the fake ones—fake smiles don’t show in the eyes.

He rushed back into the kitchen. She balanced two dishes in her hands and looked as though she were about to head out. “Is he out there?” she asked.

“Sean?”

Elise nodded.

“No.” He picked up two more plates. “Which one is Sean’s?”

“I have it.”

He led. Sean, charging down the stairs, didn’t see him. Michael pulled back at the last second before plowing into him, now sandwiched between Sean, Elise, the couch, and the wall with no escape route. “Dinner time?” Sean said and reached out for a plate in Michael’s hand.

He pulled back just in time before Sean’s fingers got on it. “These ones are for the kids,” he said.

Sean smirked. “They look the same to me.”

“I think Elise portioned them differently.”

“I can just grab more.”

He ran out of plausible arguments as quickly as they came, every reply sounding forced and strange in his head. His mouth turned to cotton, and his tongue stuck to his teeth. He had nothing to say, Sean’s hand encroaching on the wrong plate.

“I have yours, babe,” Elise said. “I made your potatoes a little lumpier—the way you like them.”

Michael’s deep breath seeped out through his teeth. Sean let him pass. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Elise handed Sean the plate and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

He offloaded his plates and then grabbed the last two from the kitchen. When he came back, they prayed and ate. Michael kept watching his brother-in-law play around with his food, salting it first as usual, eating the veggies and the chicken piece by piece, ignoring the potatoes.

A lifetime passed. Sean finally brought up a clump of the potatoes with his fork. He gazed at them for what seemed like an eternity and then sniffed them. “You put butter in these?” Sean asked Elise.

She smiled. “I pulled some from the cold box an hour ago. I thought we could live a little.”

He inched the fork into his mouth, Michael sitting on edge as Sean’s lips sealed around it, the fork coming out clean. “So good, babe,” Sean said, chewing.

Michael’s eyes met Elise’s, and they shared a collective sigh. He suppressed a smile and put a chunk of food into his mouth. When his gaze finally rested, it fell on Travers, who stared back at him with a toothless grin.

“These potatoes are good,” he said, his eyes never leaving Michael’s. “The butter must be the secret ingredient, I think.”

Michael’s pulse quickened.

He doesn’t know.

It didn’t matter. Travers was leaving in an hour, heading out to go south. And that was fine by Michael. He couldn’t leave soon enough.

SEAN FELT LIKE he didn’t exist. He was being tossed around the sea of his own mind, images flashing and surreal landscapes emerging and disappearing, not realizing he was asleep, but not remembering going to bed.

So when he woke up with a pressure on his lips and cold metal pressed to his neck, it came out of nowhere.

A pale light shone in the dark room. A man’s head floated above his face. The images his brain fed him seemed warped, the man a shadow, featureless, haunting. The shadow’s hand was closed tightly over his lips. “Don’t make a noise,” it whispered.

As Sean’s eyes adjusted, it became less like a nightmarish fantasy and morphed into something more terrifying. It was a stranger’s voice, calm and low. Sean gasped and shook. “Calm down,” the man said, “calm down.”

Next to them, Elise shifted, and the man froze in place. Sean forced his eyes to the side. She slept on her stomach, relaxed. Just beyond her body, at the other side of the bed, he saw movement in the darkness. The dull reflection of a rifle popped out from the shadows.

Someone had gotten in. A lot of people had gotten in. They were armed, and he was not. The house was cold and quiet, but his skin was hot, and his heart was thumping, and it was all he could hear.

The smooth barrel of a pistol moved from his neck and touched his face. It brushed across his cheek and rested near his eye socket. “I’m going to take my hand off your mouth,” the man whispered. “You make a noise, my friend will blow your wife to kingdom come, you hear?”

He focused on the rifle floating over his wife’s head. He looked back up at the man and nodded.

The man’s fingers released one at a time until his palm lifted from his lips. Sean’s hands trembled. The bed creaked as the man shifted his weight off the mattress. “Get up. Now.”

Sean obeyed. He had always prepared for something like this, but never considered someone getting the jump on him. All his training, his planning, seemed to fly out of his mind and disappear into the darkness.

“Let’s go,” the man said, waving his pistol toward the door.

He walked like a man headed for the electric chair, his feet shuffling, never leaving the ground. He extended his arms out to show he didn’t have a weapon. His wife kept sleeping in blissful ignorance.

They walked out of the room, and the man shut the door with a soft click. His partner didn’t follow. They walked a few more paces and rounded the corner. Another man stood at the end of the hallway like an ethereal presence, concealed in darkness. They reached the bathroom and his hostage taker shoved him inside, Sean stumbling forward against the toilet. The man shut the door behind him.

“Please, I don’t know what you’re doing.”

The man kept his voice low. “Yeah, you do.”

“You’re here to kill us.”

“I’m here to get what I need. I know you understand that.”

Sean’s limbs shook, unable to control it, his stomach pulling and shifting, sending waves of panic through his system.

The man said, “We know two things: We know you have food and we know that you, specifically, are a real son of a bitch.”

“We don’t have food.”

“But the son of a bitch part is true?”

“We don’t have much food.”

“That’s a load of bullshit, Sean, and you know it.”

His lungs wouldn’t take in air. “How do you know my—”

Something clicked, and a long, florescent bulb overhead flashed a few times before emanating a bright luminosity. Sean’s eyes took time to adjust. The man was gangly thin, but his clothes were layered thick, bulking him to double his size. His pale, yellow face was the only part of him exposed. His cheek bones were frostbitten, and his nose was large and crooked. He didn’t have to wear a mask. There were no police anymore, no police lineups—no one to save them.